Nolio Release Automation Reviews

Nolio is primarily used for production deployments, including web apps and data system deployments. We use various deployment types within the tool. Nolio is the official deployment tool at Barclays for all production-related tasks.

One standout aspect is its architecture. We can configure multiple instances on a single server using different system names or usernames. 

Another feature I like is that the graphical user interface is user-friendly and aids in efficient design and deployment.

The graphical view of when you're writing flow is the most valuable feature.

We want to expand our work to Amazon or Azure to the public cloud. We have Kubernetes on-prem and I want to know if Nolio can handle it.

In general, we are replacing vendors with virtual services because vendors are not available and it is costly to get support from them. This is the primary use case for the solution.

The CA Application Insight feature is the solution's most valuable aspect.

It's for release automation.

It has improved our speed of deployment.

CA Release Automation has a GUI which is easy to use and develop the solutions.
Most of the day-to-day tasks which need automation have been already covered by built-in actions. So you just have to drag and drop to start using it.

It has various plugins, which make integration with other tools like ServiceNow, Jenkins, and JIRA, etc. easy and helps in implementing CI and CD, following an agile approach.

The ROC provides features that help in release management and ServiceNow authentication when enabled, and can make production deployments safe and error free.

Deployments have been automated fully and now all the teams follow a single, error-free approach of deployment, which is time saving and seldom faults. It helps to implement standardization.

• Ability to maintain the maps of different environments in a single tool. The way the tool organizes and manages the information to be used in the automation deployment is one of its strengths. It is possible to have a map of all the environments involved in the Software Lifecycle (Dev|Pre|Pro), and maintain, in a centralized point, the actions that are shared between the environments and the specific actions of some environments.
• Ability to design and manage DevOps activities from a graphical viewpoint. The core of the tool is the workflow. These workflows are designed in a graphical point of view. This is an excellent functionality which is better than XML or other file based actions definitions. You can perform workflows using other workflows, so this increases the reuse of actions and reduces the copy/paste of actions.
• Ability to manage large installations with more than 5,000 servers due to the 100% scalable architecture. You can install the tool in a simple machine for simple installations or development environments. You can install the solution with redundant servers for critical installations. Also, you can distribute several components of the solution in the way you need in order of manage the deployment of large organizations with a large number of servers, a large number of applications, several technologies, CPDs distributed around the world, mix models including cloud and on premise hardware, etc. You maintain a unique point of access for all of this, sharing actions, dashboards, etc.

There have been improvements in several kinds of projects:

• Projects with more than 5,000 servers and daily deployments.
• Projects in which we must manage the deployment in a cloud environment based on the monitoring. As the number of users grows, we must deploy a cloud environment and deploy the applications. If the number of users decreases, we must uninstall the applications and release the cloud infrastructure.
• Deploying applications in a continuous integration environment, including deployment, QA, pre-production, and production environments.

The built-in action packs for different systems is the most valuable feature. The CA RA install comes with built-in plugins for tools such as TIBCO, WebSphere, IIS and so on. This helps to avoid writing custom scripts to deploy to those kinds of servers. We use those plugins instead.

It helped with auto-deployment of the pipeline from TeamCity & configuring rollbacks, and seeing versions and release pipeline status.

Some of the most valuable features of CA Release Automation are definitely the shared components, as well as the tokens. Shared components within this application are repeatable processes that you can assign throughout multiple applications, such as your business types, funding, credit, whatever else, that are repeatable processes. For example, if you wanted to set up an IS site or something along those lines, you would create a repeatable flow process with the application, and then you can leverage token values to fill in something like the service account, the passwords, that kind of stuff, that would actually be populated as part of your IS site deployment. It's pretty cool and a pretty awesome feature that we leverage all the time.

In our pipeline, right now, it's used as the release. We use Jenkins to build our applications and then it sends over to Release Automation. It's basically changed the way that we're doing our deployments. We now have, instead of three-hour deployments, they're three minutes. As well as, it creates more consistencies in the environments and helps it determine if the issue is with the server, the code, whatever else, when you're actually deploying out. It's been extremely helpful.

Some of the things that we're using for compliance and governance is basically the auditing that we can use with the application, like, who deployed it, when it was deployed, what versions were deployed from dev, QA, train, stage, production. It's been pretty helpful on that one.